Gun initiative draws big crowd, gets financial blastoff

The once-lonely cause of gun safety legislation went viral in Seattle on Thursday, as more than 1,200 people packed a ballroom and pledged more than $750,000 in launching a statewide initiative campaign to close the “gun show loophole” and require criminal background checks for all those purchasing firearms.

“Today we are climbing Isiah’s mountain, and a steep climb it is,” said the Rev. Rev. Michael Ryan, pastor of St. James Cathedral, after reading the names of — and asking a moment of silence for — victims of Seattle’s Cafe Racer massacre just a year ago.

Seattle’s Deputy Police Chief Nick Metz talked of the experience — “nothing more heartbreaking, nothing more tragic” — of telling family members that a loved one had been shot. And, after 25 years of dealing with shootings, Metz said there is a “common denominator.” Shooters tend to be people who, because of criminal background or instability or youth, should not be carrying firearms.

Background-check legislation has been stifled by the National Rifle Association, both in the U.S. Senate and the Washington Legislature.

“I wish the United States Senate was not so completely useless. I wish our state Senate were not in the hands of Rodney Tom and crazy Pam Roach,” said Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, founder and early funder of the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility.

Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple de Hirsch Sinai went a step further, decrying “spineless, corrupt, purchased politicians” who have blocked background-check legislation in both Washingtons. “We will keep saying it until we are heard, that curbing gun violence is not just a political issue but a solemn moral obligation,” Weiner said.

In the absence of a testicle transplant in Washington, D.C., or Olympia, the Alliance is launching what Hanauer called “a world class campaign to pass criminal background checks.” A moment later, MC Fred Northup Jr. asked for pledges starting at $50,000 and $25,000 — and got takers.

Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, was in the news earlier this week. He was taking a walk in New York and opened a letter postmarked from Shreveport, La. It contained a pink, oily liquid — the deadly poison Ricin. A similar letter was addressed to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a third turned up Thursday addressed to President Obama.

“Thank you for risking your lives by appearing in the same room with me,” Glaze told the Seattle luncheon.

Though on the receiving end of a lethal letter, Glaze argued that the country has reached “a tipping point” on gun safety. Glaze is the son of a gun dealer. When he was growing up, said Glaze, more than 50 percent of America’s households owned a gun. Now, the figure is about one-third.

As a result, he argued, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers are engaged in “selling more and more guns, and more and more expensive guns, to a smaller and smaller group of people.” In order to do this, they must engage in the tactics of “fear, hysteria and making people angry.”

The National Rifle Association has long benefited from the so-called “intensity factor.” Its members base their votes on the gun issue and are more likely to contribute to “pro-gun” politicians. In 1997, the NRA spent more than $5 million to defeat a gun safety initiative that required trigger locks on stored weapons and that firearms owners take a gun safety course.

“This used to be intensely lonely work done in the wilderness,” Glaze said.

During the 1997 battle, the only group actively campaigning for the initiative was Mothers Against Violence in America, which lacked resources to fight the NRA’s juggernaut. That was then. The group’s founder, Pamela Eakes, looked around at the crowded ballroom and observed, “I think it is fantastic.”

Metz brought up an uncomfortable fact: Western Washington and the Northwest have experienced the deaths that have given life to the gun safety movement. He noted the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle shootings, and the Capitol Hill massacre of six young people, both in 2006 . . . and the murders of four Lakewood police officers getting their morning coffee . . . and the Cafe Racer killings of a year ago.

Cheryl Stumbo, a survivor of the Jewish Federation shootings, spoke of the experience of having her skirt and blouse cut open in a paramedic van, of waking up after a week in a coma, of learning her uterus had been shattered by a hollow point bullet, and undergoing 20 surgeries.

“I mended, but I will never be fully restored,” Stumbo said. The number of people killed and maimed by guns puts an obligation on the living, she argued: “We need to talk about this. Demand that we talk about this.”

The Rev. Carl Livingston Jr. noted the national shock at the Newtown, Conn., massacre, but also that in the following week four young people were shot to death in Chicago, three were murdered in Boston and another four died in Baltimore. And such killings, he said, “barely grab attention” — nor does the fact that gun homicides are the leading cause of death among young African-Americans, “more than the next nine categories combined.”

“If you have done it to the least of these, Jesus said, you have done it to me,” said Livingston.

The criminal background check initiative, if it gathers sufficient signatures, will be sent to the Washington Legislature. If the Legislature “punts” — as Hanauer predicted it would — the measure will go onto the state’s 2014 ballot . . . and this time, with a tailwind.